Obama in Boulder: President brings student loan message to CU

President Barack Obama speaks at the University of Colorado's Coors Events Center on Tuesday night. (Greg Lindstrom)

President Barack Obama was greeted by an overwhelmingly enthusiastic -- sometimes raucous -- crowd at the University of Colorado as he visited Boulder on Tuesday to push his case for keeping student loan interest rates in place.

People began lining up at 5 a.m. outside CU's Coors Events Center to see and listen to Obama, who is only the second sitting president in history to visit the city and the first to visit the university.

Obama, who began his speech around 7:20 p.m. and finished about a half-hour later, invoked his own family's experience in outlining the importance of getting Congress to keep the interest rates on Stafford loans to college students at 3.4 percent. Without congressional action by July, the rates on the popular loans will double to 6.8 percent.

"This isn't something I just read in a briefing paper," Obama told the boisterous crowd of 11,000 or so gathered inside the arena. "When we got married, we got poorer together. We paid more in student loans than we paid for the first condo we bought together."

Continuing his story, the president said he and the First Lady only finished paying off their loans eight years ago -- and he praised those in attendance for their commitment to education, saying, "college isn't just the best investment you can make in your future, it's the best investment you can make in your country's future."

The president started his day at the University of North Carolina with the same message on student loans, but said "we saved the prime time event for Boulder."

The crowd roared its approval.

"The degree you earn from Colorado is going to be the best tool you've got to achieve the American promise," Obama said. "It is the clearest path we got to the middle class."

The Sink surprise

Obama's whirlwind visit to Boulder began with a delayed landing at Buckley Air Force Base on Tuesday evening. That was followed by a helicopter ride on Marine 1 to Boulder Municipal Airport, where he was met by a motorcade teeming with black SUVs, white passenger vans and dozens of Boulder police and sheriff's vehicles.

The motorcade headed toward the university and then suddenly punched west on Baseline Road, north on Ninth Street and east on University Avenue, before making a surprise stop at The Sink on University Hill.

Startled patrons greeted the president with smiles and camera flashes inside the venerable University Hill watering hole. Outside the restaurant, a crowd roared goodbye to the president as he carried a pizza from The Sink into his presidential vehicle.

One woman, so taken by Obama's presence out on the street, managed to dump the yogurt she was holding on to the ground, splashing the purple liquid on the president's black pants.

"Getting yogurt on the president, that's a good story," Obama said, wiping at his trousers.

The woman told the president she was "so embarrassed" by her error.

Obama mentioned the yogurt incident in his opening remarks at Coors Events Center, where just about every seat was filled and audience members frequently shouted out the president's praises during his speech.

Eisenhower preceded Obama

Obama's trip to Boulder followed by 58 years the last and only time a sitting president -- President Dwight Eisenhower -- visited the city. Both visits had their contrasts and similarities.

Each commander-in-chief spoke to about 10,000 people and each made unexpected side trips during their visits. Obama visited The Sink and Eisenhower traded in his sedan for a "top-down red convertible" somewhere between Denver and Boulder and drove it through the Highland Park neighborhood, according to press accounts at the time.

Former Camera editor Laurence Paddock, who was a 25-year-old photographer when Eisenhower came to town on Sept. 14, 1954, to formally dedicate the Bureau of Standards building -- now the National Institute of Standards and Technology -- said Tuesday that things were a little more laid back regarding a presidential visit in those days.

He said he simply walked two blocks with his Speed Graphic camera from his home to cover the event. Unlike the Secret Service clearing parking lots all around the Coors Events Center on Tuesday, people during Eisenhower's visit parked right near the venue.

"When Eisenhower came, security for the president was nowhere what it is today," Paddock said. "It was great -- everybody was thrilled he was coming."

The same enthusiasm appeared to be in play Tuesday, as hundreds of onlookers lined Obama's motorcade route trying to get a glimpse of the president. While a few people held signs that denounced hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and urged the president not to attack Iran, most of the people standing along the road smiled adoringly and waved at the passing caravan of government vehicles.

The crowd inside the Coors Events Center was just as excited about the president's arrival, despite having spent hours in line to get tickets to the event and then hours more waiting to get inside the arena.

But while a presidential visit was a big deal for Boulder both in 1954 and Tuesday, CU political science chair Ken Bickers said that unlike Eisenhower's visit -- which was largely ceremonial -- Obama was in Boulder to push a purely political message as he battles for re-election this November.

"Boulder is the canary in the coalmine for him," Bickers said. "If he can't extract the youth vote on the campus of the University of Colorado, he's in trouble with the rest of Colorado and the nation."

The professor said of the students he talks to, more of them are concerned about finding a job after graduation than in making sure student loan rates are kept low.

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